


His Very First Death

by Thunderrrstruck



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, F/M, Hospitals, Original Universe, Pre-Canon, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29290239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thunderrrstruck/pseuds/Thunderrrstruck
Summary: [Set inside the universe of my original novel. Precursor to the novel itself by twenty years.]The string of good luck of Damien Briggs, a medical intern, is about to come to an end.
Relationships: Damien Briggs & Rachael Coleman, Damien Briggs/Adele Abner, Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s), Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Collections: Déjà Vu | an original universe





	His Very First Death

It isn’t the first time Damien wakes up from a nightmare, but it is the first time tires screeches echo in his head long after the point of jolting awake. Coffee splashes into his mug while he blinks away the splotches in his eyes, black dots like the night in his dreamscape. He chases the memory away with scalding, brown liquid, and his heart soon quells in response. Near-noon light streams in through the apartment windows. The fridge hums, the coffee press clicks back onto marble, Adele shuffles off the couch to greet the late-riser: a typical Saturday.

Damien smiles as the woman steers herself around the kitchen table and plants a quick kiss on his cheek.

“‘Morning,” she mumbles contentedly, pulling away while a hand lingers around the small of his back. “Late start. That means.. late shift today?”

“Two until twelve,” he answers.

Adele’s nose twitches in obvious disappointment, causing Damien’s heart to already sinks a little in preparation of his moment of return. He just knows he will set foot through the bedroom door to see his girlfriend slumbering in their bed, he’ll fall asleep next to her, careful not to rock the mattress, and come morning she will arise around six-thirty, and he will follow five hours later, missing the brunt of her work but also missing the moments she rested, the moments they could spend time together the way couples should. Days pass in this fashion; he blinks and the Fourth of July turns into Thanksgiving, people are stringing up Christmas lights, and Hanukkah stares him down from six days away.

Damien sets down his mug to face Adele properly but keeps his fingers clenched around the handle. “I’m sorry,” he tries.

“You’re saving lives, who am I to compete with that,” she quips with an affectionate smile. She dances from his side to the fridge, opens the door, and drags the milk off the shelf. “It’s fine. Amber wants to meet up for dinner today, anyways. There’ll be other days, really, it’s fine.”

He wants to say that it is  _ not _ fine. That she doesn’t  _ sound _ fine. He wants to say that spending as little time with her as he is is tearing his heart apart. But when he opens his mouth, she grabs the cereal from the pantry and the courage to offer counterpoint slips beneath the waves like Raisin Bran into a white ocean. He fills his mouth with coffee instead and merely smiles when she glances over.

“What are we going to do about the holidays?”

_ This question again _ .

“I put in a request for Hanukkah for three days off, and it’s been approved.”

“What about New Years’ Eve?”

“That one is still pending,” he attempts to say as earnestly as he can.

“Really?”

“The hospital gets much busier around that time!” he defends, and when his cheap rationalisation earns a cocked eyebrow and a tensed pair of shoulders, his resolve falls even further. He shifts towards her space, a hand coming to rest upon her waist. “Beer chuggers and old people,” he excuses. “There isn’t much I  _ can _ do.”

“No other staff is available?” Her inquiry would have been harmless on paper, but in tone it rings dryly through the late morning air.

“‘Dell...” Damien says, but where he hoped the words would just come to him, none rush to his rescue. As much as he wants to spend time with her, fear wracks him. Given this year’s track record, the possibility that they will end up unable to fit together looms on the horizon. And while every time he looks at her, he fills with incredible warmth, the sensation to run far, far away creeps within him like a weed, knocking on the backdoor with a clownish grin and a big, red nose. He blinks at her in silent wait. Surely, an english teacher will know the exact right thing to say that diffuses the situation wonderfully.

She straightens her spine and pushes his hand off her side.

“I’m  _ going _ to my family’s for Christmas,” she states. “If you can’t come, I’ll manage like we have been. Jobs are jobs, right? I’ll see you when I get back.” She picks up the cereal bowl and settles herself on the opposite side of the kitchen, leaning against the countertop. Her face is a facade of indifference. But her eyes tell a different story. Damien notes that her eyes dip towards the floor, not focused on her meal, not focused on her partner across the way. Like it has been every morning since the start of his internship, they argue, there’s insistence, and one of them cannot meet the others eyes. No wonder every other doctor Damien ever knew lived alone.

_ Not this doctor _ . He strides forward, stopping only because the table in the middle commands it so.

“I still have the better part of a month,” he says. “We’re barely into December.”

“Oh? Then why’d you take time out for Hanukkah three months ago?” Adele shoots back.

“And I took out New Years’  _ one _ month ago!”

“Three weeks,” she replies. “Not even. It’s not even been three weeks, let alone a month.”

“Adele.” He wants her back. He needs her back. Yet there stands a table in the way of even the simplest of contacts. His arm would barely reach past halfway.

“As long as  _ you’re _ happy, right?” she interrupts. “If it’s your family, schedule now! If it’s not, ‘oh whatever, other people be damned’. There’s a reason I haven’t told my parents that we live together yet.”

“That’s not–.” He swallows back his words, for already is he at the receiving end of one of her infamous  _ ‘don’t test me’ _ stares. Things with his family are complicated; relationships have strained over the years and reconnection is a delicate process of dedicating energy – boundless energy he sometimes doesn’t feel he has to give – to the reparations. However, he cannot say that. Adele already knows. To say that would amount to nothing but the idea of excuses, another loophole through which he evades conversation.

He pulls back the reins and glances away only to spy his gear by the doorway. Work does not start for another hour, and the hospital is a mere twenty minute drive away, but he sees no other alternative; Adele needs her space, that’s how she works. “I’m in my first year of internship,” he explains, pulling his gaze away from the doorway and landing it upon his girlfriend once again. “There are four years total. If I slack off now, my whole career goes down the drain.”

A tense few beats of silence. Despite how intensive her eyes are, Damien tells himself not to look away.

“Where’s the line, then?”

“What?”

“Between working for your career and being a workaholic?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.” Exasperation rings around the room. “I don’t want to do this right now. How about we pick this up when I get back?”

“I’ll be asleep by then.”

“We’ll do it some other time, then.” Yet another postponing. At this rate, it will be the new year, and their only synced free time will be spent arguing about a multitude of things, like the dishes Damien didn’t do, the trash Adele forgot to take out, and which of their families is worth more attention.

“Later, honey,” he says in a deadpan while marching for the door. He tugs on his gloves, coat, and slings the bag over his shoulder all while waiting for a reply. Of course, it doesn’t come until he’s halfway out of the door and his keys are jangling from his fingers.

“See you tomorrow,” she replies, tired and lacking any variance in tone.

And then the door snaps shut between them.

* * *

Within the first week of internship, Damien’s driving route committed to his memory. Fresh out of medical school, he dove into the fieldwork without hesitation, wide-eyed and raring for a challenge. The knowledge he brought in paid off; for five whole months, he hadn’t a case which he could not handle. Pulling through each with ease built him an imaginary, technicolour coat of confidence, and wearing said coat is what holds his chin up high as he walks through the sliding doors of Maycaster Memorial Hospital.

Up the stairs, around the hallway half a loop, a quick change in the locker room, and Damien walks into the ICU with his head held high, a clipboard in hand, and a stethoscope around his neck.

Rounds complete quickly today, which leaves ample time for Damien to spend more time in his patients’ rooms. He falls into a routine of light conversation, monitoring vitals, and passing responsibility off to labs if condition demands it. By the time of his last patient, all the small talk has been squeezed out of him like the very last remnants of toothpaste from its tube. He inspects the medication drip by raising it against the fluorescent ceiling lights, all while a sense of quietude persists. The woman in bed rests soundly, faint snores washed out by steady beeps and afternoon static. Damien rightens his posture but his tension barely ebbs away.

A sense of dread settles itself in his stomach, instead:

At this point in treatment, a lung cancer patient has a ninety-percent chance of never making it, the steepest odds he faces yet. He focuses – like any doctor would – on the smallest odds, the ten percent that dictates she lives. However, it proves difficult to distance himself from the streak of good luck he has been riding since starting his residency internship; thoughts of calling in the attending – or even another intern – cross his mind. He glances to the exit in time to see a pair of lavender scrubs pass.

“Duran!” he barks. The fellow intern backpedals into view again.

“Yo, Briggs,” he says, lips winding into a smirk, “what’s up?”

“What’s your caseload like?”

Duran lifts his hand to the doorframe and presses his weight against it. “Staph infection, leukemia, pretty moderate. Why?”

Damien opens his mouth to ask. All that is required of him is a single word:  _ ‘trade’ _ with a question inflection. It is only a matter of persuasion before the staph infection case is his and his record holds up another week.  _ Do it, just do it _ , the urge boils in his lungs, but his larynx sews itself shut.

“No reason.” He forces a smile as if that would make all the difference. “Curious.”

The opportunity drops his hand to his side and disappears around the corner in a flash of pale purple.

“In over your head?” a voice coughs into existence. Like sand inside a paper bag, it trails from one ear across to the other. Damien whips around to the old woman lying on the bed. No longer is she asleep (or has she always been awake?); his heart lurches, and his face heats, flustered. Sparing a subtle glance to the clipboard in hand, his eyes flit across the patient’s name:  _ Francine Goswer _ .

“You’re awake.”

“I am, indeed.” She smiles as if that fact is the single most brightest fact in existence.

A lump lodges in Damien’s throat.  _ You have to make it through this _ , he thinks.  _ No trading, no weaving through the hard shit _ . The only viable road was the road directly in front of him.

“Ms. Goswer,” he begins, and he almost has trouble getting the next two words out, “is there..” He clears his throat, “is there anyone you would like us to notify?”

“No, there is not, dear,” she says. Her voice washes over him like honey, unclenching the knots between his shoulder blades he wasn’t even aware he sported until now. It should not have, however, for what she said hung on his soul with a titanic weight.

“You don’t have any family?” he asks, nerves sparking at the extremities. She shakes her head. “No friends?”

“I don’t want them here,” she replies.

Again, the honey-like rasping washes over him. His fingers fiddle against the back of his clipboard.

“Estranged?”

“We’re fine.”

“I know that it feels like you don’t want them here right now. They will want to be here supporting you, however.” 

“I know what I feel,” she says, ever pleasant, ever harmless. Ever  _ kind _ . She is so at ease that it scares Damien tremendously, and watching her shake her head again is the gasoline to feed the spark.

“Why? What do you think you’re doing? Why are you sitting through this by yourself? They  _ should _ be here with you.” A pause for breath barely allows Francine time to answer, as Damien barges on. “They don’t even know, do they?”

“Please,” she soothes, lifting a hand towards him. Her chuckle forces itself through another cough. “I’ve made my peace. And they know, and they respect my decision to face this alone.”

Damien blinks. Wrapping his mind around her explanation proves as difficult as shoving a square peg into a round hole.

“Bullshit,” he spits out.

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I do not believe that is your call to make, dear.”

In spite of his expectations, Francine’s lips retain their upward-crescent shape.

“Doesn’t your family want to see you one last time?” he gapes. Off in the distance, the sound of a pager beeps, but it hardly registers and Damien’s quick instincts remain dormant.

“They’ll be glad their last memory of me will not be tainted by all this,” she gestures to the tubes lacing her arms, trailing up to her nose and over to a suspended IV bag, “and sterile lighting.”

It is Damien’s turn to shake his head. Once. And then twice. Three times. “No.”

“Doctor, how old are you?”

“Why does this matter?” he demands, too startled to come across as anything but icy. I’m twenty-six.”

The stale air splits with the sound of her laugh. He feels the particles around him race with sudden propulsion, but the excitement is brief. It dies when Francine delves into a fit of coughing. Damien drops his clipboard onto the side of the bed and places a hand firmly upon her sternum. The other reorganises the pillows she is resting against to better support her failing airways.

“Don’t speak for a few moments,” he instructs, pulling back to a stand, his hands falling around his clipboard again. He whiles away a couple seconds in patient silence, listening for a change in condition, but in no time at all, Francine’s positivity returns to each and every crevice tracing her forehead, eyes, and chin.

“You’re so very young, dear,” she says, “I have no expectations of you understanding, just that you respect my decision.”

An iron vise secures and locks bars around his heart with a resounding shudder. Every squeeze it makes sends him closer and closer to another tangent, but for the sake of the honey-voiced woman lying under his care – not his jurisdiction but his  _ care _ , his target for every scrap of empathy possible – he tries prying the iron away from his heart, one digit at a time.

“Damien, a word?” the doorway interjects. Before he even turns all the way, a coworker latches onto his arm and steers him from the patient’s room, across the hall, into the break room. As soon as the door shudders shut against the frame, Rachael fixates a glare at him. “I’ve been trying to page you this whole time!”

“What for?” Damien asks, his mind switching suddenly into emergency mode.

“Need I  _ remind _ you that doctors have to  _ listen _ to whatever their  _ patients’ _ demand?”

_ Oh _ . The adrenaline drips back down to regular levels. His shields fall, their fuel gone. Her voice is too salty, too judgemental, that he lifts his clipboard between their two eyelines so he can pace in the back without her sentiment ringing in his head.

“This is about something else, isn’t it,” she demands. “You ‘n’ Adele, still having issues.”

Damien lowers his clipboard to shoot her a look of distaste.

“That is completely unrelated.”

“It’s clearly affecting your work, so I beg to differ.”

“Ever heard of compartmentalisation?

“Oh, so you  _ admit _ there’s a problem? That’s great!” Rachael mocks, her voice pitching up an octave and hands raising in insincere ‘hallelujah’. “I don’t think  _ you’ve  _ ever heard of it. So, before you get out there again to treat  _ all _ your patients, spill it, Briggs.”

Damien’s mouth drains of saliva. His throat clenches. Normally, he’d never open up to a coworker, but Rachael proves different. Since the awkward days of graduate school, she stuck by his side. Of the people in his life, she is one of two he feels he owes anything to. Thus, he musters a swallow, clears his throat, and attempts in a low voice: “We still can’t decide what to do for New Years.”

“Figured as much,” Rachael mutters, crossing her arms.

“Can you not be so smug?” snaps Damien.

She rolls her eyes but nods her head in allowance of his continuation.

“It’s weighing me down. Every day is just…”

“Harder than the last?”

“Alright,” he says, a definitive restart. “ _ Yes _ , I know every year Adele visits her family around this time. I know she wants me to go with her. But it’s hard to take days off work, and she doesn’t seem to  _ get _ that.”

“What if you take separate planes in at separate times? See each other when you see each other?”

“That’s not the iss–!” He breaks his steamroller, breathes, and this time  _ eases _ onto the gas. “The issue isn’t transport. It’s our work schedules. It’s the fact that we haven’t had a real conversation in months!”

"And there's nothing you can do?"

"If there were, do you think we would be standing _ here _ talking?"

"Touché, D," Rachael recoils.

“I'm tired of fighting, Rache.”

"I know. Sorry I can't help you decide anything. Also sorry that I don’t really want to get messed up in this. Or that I have no energy to, either. Both of you guys are smart people, you love each other. You'll figure out something."

“You’re of no help,” Damien deadpans.

“Whatever, at least you vented, right? Feel a little bit better?"

Damien withdraws from the present to evaluate the shallow changes her words enacted on him. Frankly, he doesn't feel better; his spirits are sticky now with false hope. However sweet it tastes in the moment, by the morning, his tongue will ring with bitter, tacky, sour mud.

Before their conversation can evolve any further, two melodies of beeping weave together. A single glance to the digital face of his pager throws his heart into his throat. Eyes locking with Rachael's, he sees his own state mirrored in her whites: pure epinephrine.

_ Someone is coding _ .

Two sets of sneakers slap against the tiles. Damien flings the door open, and out of the break room he pours. He shoots across the hall, squeaking to a stop once his hands clasp around the bed's metal railing. A cluster of nurses join him at Francine's bedside. Wheezing, beeping, shouts, and scuffles; the dance with death begins. The play runs through his mind, Damien's mouth only a split second behind in conveying orders. Chest compressions and injections, a rapid oscillation to keep this woman afloat.

Someone fills in the space beside him. He welcomes the support, but nothing deters his focus:

_ Don't let her die! _

Another round of compressions, injections, shouting, and scuffles.

"Hey," the presence calls from his side, but his attention does not divert.

A dark-skinned hand brushes his forearm. "D," she calls again, but he shouts for another nurse. He pushes his agenda on the lavender pair of scrubs, he shifts his expression into a mask, and the saving continues.

_ Don't. Let. Her. Die! _

The saving continues.

"Call it."

_ Let the saving please continue! _

"It’s not over.”

"Don’t," her voice bites from a foot away. “It's over. Call it."

His next exhale barely escapes the constricting of his throat, pure stubborn unacceptance. The further he pushes, the easier it becomes, the longer her life, the more time she has for goodbyes, for amends, for her family and friends–

_ Call it _ .

With all the might of a child tugging his mother's hand, trying to stay at the park another second longer, he raises his wrist. The glass of his watch sparkles in sterile lighting. There is no mistaking of the position of its hands, so abundantly clear yet he cannot speak them, his mouth, parched, his tongue glued to the roof. His eyes wild in their sockets – the nurses watch him expectantly. It's his command. It's his jurisdiction. It's  _ his care _ .

"Five-oh-one."

As soon as the words slip into the air, he recoils. Three feet away. The heaviest burden falls from his shoulders, crashing with his good luck run at his feet, a forbidden kind of relief. He looks at the wrinkled skin around Francine’s eyes, allowing himself the brief succumb to the disbelief that things don’t really die. In five minutes’ time, the eyes will alight again, reassurances will be spilling off her lips for every nurse to hear. Notes of honey, pearls of age-old wisdom. He can tell himself it is going to happen. He tells himself,  _ the others will realise how wrong they were. They will feel awful for ordering that I stop. _ He thinks, in just a matter of time there will be no need to trudge home with yet another layer of disappointment on his mind. It’s just a matter of time.

But it is not a matter of time for Francine, anymore.

It is only a matter of time for Damien.

* * *

Damien swings his work bag haphazardly from his shoulder to the wall as soon as he treads upon cheap, apartment carpet. Shoes kick off, jacket shrugs itself onto the floor. He shuffles into his bedroom and collapses against the cotton sheets, head burying into a pillow. He gives in to the mattress, sinking into the black of his eyelids, when a wave of springs and a jostle of his pillow lifts his head to the left.

Adele watches him with an unreadable expression. Her blue eyes remain guarded and her jaw clenched, as if her mind is already made up and she is merely waiting for his next  _ ‘the words of work’ _ speech to pass.

None of what he said last morning sits right within him.

“It’s nearly one in the morning. What are you doing awake?” he mumbles.

“I just wanted to talk,” she says, quiet in her uncertainty. “Like we keep forgetting to?”

Damien pulls himself up to his knees, shifts around, and sits cross-legged directly across from her. “Me too,” he gently agrees. Everything he wants to say is suddenly in front of him, and his arms are no longer too short to grab it. “I want to spend New Years with you.”

It’s like a ray of sunlight sprinkling upon a meadow of a morning dew. “Even if it means taking more time away from your practice?”

He nods.

“Even if you’ll also have to endure my annoying mom and sister?” she jokes.

“It’s worth it.” He reaches forward one hand, gesturing for her to take hold. It’s all worth it.  _ You are worth it _ . “I don’t want to waste the time I have with you.”

Because it isn’t the beginning or how the end plays out that matters.

It is all the moments in between.


End file.
